Since we expect a number of newbies at the meetup, I figured I post a quick video showing how to get Commons up-and-running using Acquia Dev Desktop. I found it to be a little bit tricky, mainly because the memory requirements for Commons are a bit higher than for core Drupal. The video shows how to tweak a couple of memory setting in the php.ini file.

NOTE: If you're using the Windows version of Acquia Dev Desktop, you can ignore the "apc.shm_size" change - it isn't used in Windows!

In the video, I mention that Windows users might need to utilize an alternative file extraction program to open the tar.gz file that contains Acquia Commons. One possible option is 7-zip.

Additionally, the two php.ini memory-related changes that I make are:

memory_limit = 256M (original value is 128M)

apc.shm_size = 64M (original value is 32M)

To learn more about php.ini files and what exactly APC (Alternative PHP Cache) does, check out the following links: